when an individual goes away into the desert for a while and comes back, he can re-integrate into society. he can learn how to interact again by immersion. but when everyone leaves, for over a year, and there is no society to come back to.

nobody can predict what human existance will be like with no society. this has never happened before. it’s a huge experiment. it sounds like a good idea - without society the people can’t organise resistance to an authoritarian government. they can’t have experiences on which they can base judgements and what is true or right. They can’t have sub cultures that challenge the state senctioned mono-culture we mould them into in school. they can’t have any culture at all. They can’t have personal discussions where they learn from each other and become smart and confident and resilient, where they build trust and can stand united against threats.

it sounds convenient and easy.

but really anything could happen. it’s a huge risk. it’s a bit like vaccinating 100% or people with a novel type of vaccine - not just a new class but a novel vaccination mechanism.

society is the only thing sustaining humanity as a species - society IS humanity…

it’s just gone. in one year it’s all gone.

nobody knows what will develop now in its place.

It attend from too much power in the hands of too few people. they reacted to a crisis. they over-reacted. they may (or may not, probably not) resolve the crisis.

it’s like burning down the house to stop a bedbug infestation.

We are living in the post covid world. It will be like this forever. Passports were introduced in a post-pandemic environment. They were a temporary emergency measure. They never went away.

Lockdowns are here to stay in the same way. There will be prison-like restrictions on movement forever. They won’t be as severe as today, they will be loosened a bit, but they are here to stay.

Our children will live in a prison.

The challenge is, how can we prepare them for that. There will be a lot of senseless violence, mental illness, extreme poverty, fear. And all of that will seem to justify authoritarian government. How can we teach them the skills to cope in this future … especially when we have only bad guesses what it will look like.

but the pre-covid world wasn’t perfect either. maybe the post-apocolyptic world will be better! nobody has a clue. nobody is even stepping back and looking at the big picture this way - they are assuming the post-shock world will be exactly the same - the shock will have minor or zero impact.

over the next few years everything will change. then over the next decades everything will change again. we are living through the apocalypse. one year with no society.

two years with no society

several years, children going through puberty and their formative years with no society.

it will be unimaginably different, in unimaginable ways.